Let's see... what else? Since I last posted here on LiveJournal, my wife Ellen and I have added another Pearce to the brood - Joan Elizabeth, my first daughter. She's going to turn 1 this Saturday. Kinda crazy.

Other than that, things are good. I kinda just wanted to see if there was anyone still following this blog, so feel free to leave a comment and let me know. I don't see myself returning to posting here full force... but I have to admit, I'm sort of nostalgic for this ol' web platform. I feel like I made a lot of friends here, to say nothing of all the comics I did. It was a real training ground for the types of strips I'm doing now.

Hello friends. You may have noticed my rate of posting here at LiveJournal has dropped in the last few weeks. Some of you might be wondering if I'm drawing comics anymore. I'm happy to say I am: I've been posting them with regularly over on my website and my new Tumblr blog. Please follow me on Tumblr or bookmark the site if you're interested in continuing on reading my stuff.

I'd never want to say "I'm done with LJ" but for the time being, I think I'm going to concentrate on those two venues for my strips. I have an almost decade-long run here on LiveJournal and I hate the idea of turning my back on the site entirely. I've met wonderful, supportive people through this blog and have made friendships which have gone far beyond commenting on one another's posts.

Beyond the scope of drawing four comics every week, my workload in the past few months has become crazy. I've agreed to teach seven periods of instruction this school year, foregoing my usual prep period. While it's only an extra 50 minutes of teaching, losing my prep has been a real game changer in how I have to approach my job and my time outside of school. Simply stated: I can post my comics to my website and Tumblr from school during my 25 minute lunch period. I cannot post to LiveJournal due to the school's web restrictions. That limits my ability to use LJ and... well yeah, leads to the lack of posting.

At any rate, this isn't a goodbye, it's a goodbye for now. Please bookmark the other sites and stay in touch!

…and this brings the first week of comics to a close. I decided early on I wanted to use the first week as a chance to sort of rewrite my “About the Artist” link you see to the left over there. I always wanted an actual comic posted there instead of a link to a rambling blog post where I’m far too hard on myself on a lot of things.

I debated long and hard as to whether I wanted to continue posting my chalkboard doodles for the upcoming school year. After three years solid of Sunday postings, I’ve done just about every character or situation I can think of. Further, I often draw the EXACT same drawings, year in and year out. It’s the nature of the job. Just as I teach Romeo & Juliet to every new group of Freshman, I’ll continue drawing myself as various superhero characters on the blackboard.

I’ve decided to keep posting these however, because… quite simply, they’re popular. I understand very little about “site views” and all that jazz, but when I do look at that widget, these are always amongst the most viewed of my posts… and that includes the comic. Over the past six months, a number of these have become popular on the website Pinterest. I know less about Pinterest than I do about site views, but if people are liking something I do well enough to share it somewhere, I should probably keep doing it.

Anyway, here’s the first drawing of the year. I decided I wanted to go big for the first week so I designed an elaborate Welcome piece for the Class of 2016 which took up the entire space of the classroom’s chalkboard.

I have to be honest- this was a larger undertaking than I anticipated! I thought I’d only need a half an hour to draw this beast, but it took double that when you figure in the sketch planning I needed to do to fit in as many characters as possible. I tried to run the gamut of cartoon characters that I found interesting and were relevant to someone who’d be in 9th grade this year. The only one I might have missed the mark on is Yakko Warner, but as established this summer, the characters are making a huge comeback, if only with my sons in our house.

Teacher comics will recommence this coming Monday. In past years, I’ve started them today (the Tuesday following Labor Day) but it always felt strange to me to begin my first full week of comics on a week where everybody has Monday off.

I’ve made a couple of decisions concerning the format of the comic I want to mention before next week. In previous years, the comic was essentially a 6 to 8 panel strip, Monday through Thursday. I don’t want to oversell myself as an artist or anything but doing a comic that size four times a week… it was tough work! There’s a reason why newspaper comic artists only do an oversized Sunday strip once a week, I’ve found!

I never did mind the work, because it was the best way to get my ideas across and it gave me a lot of opportunities to stretch my artistic wings, as meager as they might be. I just want to emphasize: where volume is concerned, a strip like that four times a week can be a daunting proposition.

I’ve come to the conclusion I won’t be able to produce strips in that format regularly for this school year. Teaching seven periods straight with no prep time leaves me pretty knackered at the end of the day. Drawing relaxes me and is truly a hobby of mine so I’d never stop doing the comic entirely but something had to give.

…and here it is. I’ll still be producing comics on a M-Th schedule, but they’ll be closer in format to the journal comics I was posting this summer; one to three panel comic strips. I’ll try to make each comic a story unto itself, but also add up to one big comic. After three years of posting these comics, I’m hoping I’ll have the shorthand built up with my audience where this won’t seem to severe a cut! I’m honestly excited about the possibilities and challenges this affords me for the upcoming months.

Fridays will remain my self-indulgent Odds & Ends day, Saturdays will still bring Thrift Store Finds, and this coming Sunday will begin my year of chalkboard photo posts. I invite you to take a look at the links below to see what fun stuff I did in the last school year… and hope to do with the upcoming school year.